Reflections

I've been photographing reflections again recently, something I return to occasionally as a photographic exercise, or more accurately an exercise in seeing. Jean-Claude Lemagny's essay "Is Photography a Plastic Art" from the book "Poetics of Space, A Critical Photographic Anthology" is a favorite of mine and particularly insightful when thinking about photographing reflections.

Lemagny defines the plastic arts as those that "involve the manipulation of substance that yeilds to the pressuer of our finges... direct contact with a substance that takes into account it's inherent resistance." In other words, any creative effort that reproduces 3-dimentional forms in 2-dimentions through the manipulation of material: sculpture, pottery, painting and all of the arts involving drawing and sketching. While photography does not involve substance directly, says Lemagny, "it is, in any case, a visual art that depends on reflected light and has the fundamental problem of translating a 3-dimentional reality into a 2-dimentional surface. It even shares with sculpture... it's opposite... the same problem of expressing three dimensions in a two-dimensional medium."

He goes on to discuss theater and film, which many suppose to be photography's siblings. Not so, says Lemagny. Although all three involve issues of space, theater and film are arts of movement and narrative. "Photography is bound up with a specific place and instant in an absolute fashion. The incorrect way to look at a photograph is to imagine it is telling a story. Any and every wrong use of photography comes from this misunderstanding... movies and the theater, which have time at their disposal, work with meaning. Photography does neither. If the theater is deprived of movement and speech, it freezes into sculpture... which only photography can convey. Without movement and sound, movies immediately become photography and cease to have any meaning."

This is dramatically and paradoxically demonstrated in the closing scene of Kieslowski's Decalogue One. The film's conclusion shows the frozen frame of a television broadcast which is filled with meaning precisely because it has no movement and sound. As the image slowly begins moving frame by frame and fades to black it proves Lemagny's point perfectly: it is filled with all of the meaning and emotion weight of the story that has just concluded.

Photography's fundamental challenges are completely apparent when photographing reflections: translating space, volume and form into 2-dimentions. A reflection is rendered into 2-dimentions by the surface upon which it is viewed. The reflective substrate also presents a barrier which separates the reflection from the space and volume behind it, which also become a visible part of the reflected image. This space and volume forms an armature providing dark areas which support the reflected image. All of this, the space being reflected and that which supports it, are compressed into a 2-dimentional image.

The substantialities of black, negative space confirm Lemagny's contention about shadows and their role in photography: "shadow is passive; it is negation. In photography... things are the other way around. What is first, what is material, what provides structure... is shadow. Shadow functions by receptiveness, its openness, or its resistance to light. The shining of light, its movement, only stand out because of the profound substantialness of shadow. Photography is the art of making a concrete substance out of the nothingness of shadow."

Lemagny concludes, "we thus grasp the obvious symmetry in which photography and sculpture coexist in the panorama of plastic arts. At each extreme, there is the exact same basic given – modeling... on one side there is modeling by hand, and on the other modeling by light.

This is a very important point, especially in the digital photographic age. Our relationship with photographs seem to have changed. Increasingly, photographs are not about prints and reproduction on surfaces, they are images we see on a computer monitor. A monitor is a surface but the image is not a physical part of it: it is an impermanent transmission of light by a device that is turned on and off, introducing an element of time that is not connected in any way to the image itself. Photographs on monitors also seem more closely connected to the image's subject matter, whereas a photograph on a surface is by nature a step further removed.

Not that anything is wrong with images on monitors. In a way it is the closest approximation of the experience of looking at transparencies projected on a screen. The nostalgia of that aside — the sound of the projector fan, the dropping of slides, the smell of the projector bulb heating up and the gritty feel of the screen — the combination of slide and projector was probably the ideal way to view a photograph.

Genealogy

Flax seeds, Londonderry Linen sample with overshot weave pattern, explanatory note, hand-colored ferrotype photograph.

This photograph is of my grandmother's great-great-grandmother, Sarah Stuart (McCauley) Weston, born in 1787 in Merrimac, New Hampshire. The photo dates from the early 1850's, shortly before her death.

Sarah Stuart Weston's great-grandparents came to America in about 1720 from Ulster in the north of Ireland. They settled in Londonderry, New Hampshire – a newly established town named after their home in Ireland – and made their living in part by the cultivation and processing of flax into linen, a trade the Scots-Irish had successfully developed in Ireland.

The note about the linen sample, which dates from 1804, was written by my grandmother, Dorothy (Bowen) Sisson, in about 1920 and reads as follows:

A specimen of my great-great-grandmother
Weston's table linen spun and woven when she
was eighteen years old, four years before she
was married. We do not think any of her children
have shown as much skill as she. The marking
which is a fac-simile shows that it is more
than a hundred years old. D.B.

Forgetting

I finally visited 'Henri Cartier-Bresson and the Art and Photography of Paris' at the Art Institute of Chicago last week. Seeing these photos was a great reminder to stop editing, stop saying to myself "no, that's not quite right... don't shoot that... that won't work" and just trust my eyes and proceed on instinct.

When I left the exhibit and got outside on the street there were images everywhere. I've had this experience so many times before that it shouldn't be a surprise, but the truth always seems surprising. I think one of defining aspects of humanity is that we constantly forget the things we learn. At least I know that I do.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
– T.S. Eliot, LITTLE GIDDING (No. 4 of 'Four Quartets')

Plywood Time

The city is covered in plywood. Everything in the process of construction seems to be surrounded by the swirling knots and grain patterns of a plywood barrier.

I'm interested in plywood as an assemblage of layers of frozen, visible time.

Photography is a meditation on the perception of time. Movement, any type of movement, fascinates me because it is an exploration of time.

A photograph of movement is a document of the succession of continuity. When photographed, a movement is shown the way it existed in a specific moment -- it was different both before and after the way we see it isolated in a photograph. Therefore, you can't consider the essence of movement without considering the essence of time.

Paradoxically, although movement can be photographed, it does not actually exist in a fixed state -- it is not an object we can return to.

I'm constantly seeking out examples of time other that movement: physical examples I can study for a period of time that isn't dictated by movement itself.

Of course this logically brings me to the study of plywood.

The Morning Walk

I've started a regular routine of morning photography again. The strong urge to resume doing this coincides, of course, with the darkest depths of winter here in Chicago. We've had a string of days with single-digit temps the past two weeks. Seems like the worse the weather the more I want to be outdoors with a camera.

It's great to have a dedicated period of time again each day for 'pedestrian' photography. I've been varying my route slightly, but the starting point is the Chicago Ave. Redline CTA station and the destination is my office in the Sullivan Center at Monroe and State. It's a fine walk of about a mile and a half with an endless variety of locations and situations.

Other things are happening as well...

I'm reading a new photo book: The Ongoing Moment by Geoff Dyer. Really enjoying it because it is written by a non-photographer. Mr. Dyer offers a very fresh consideration of photography and it is interesting to experience it from his perspective.

Also, I now have a Flickr account. It seems that all of the news organizations and publications I pay attention to now have 'Flickr pools:' collections of images submitted by users that they publish online and/or in print. In fact, the image above was featured by both Chicago Public Radio and Gapers Block in the Feb. 19th edition of their webpages.

I'm grateful for this new avenue to share my images. I've always hoped my photographs would be something that people stumble upon rather than seek out, which is why having them published online is so exciting for me. Many thanks to both Chicago Public Radio and Gapers Block!

Springfield to Chicago: I-55 Sequence

This project is a sequence of 32 images made while traveling between Springfield and Chicago, IL, on Interstate Highway 55.

Traveling this route, I watch the passing landscape for three hours from a passenger-side car window, daydreaming and photograph the trip. As a passenger, I don’t have to watch the road, but when I do, I see the future ahead and the past behind. When I look straight to the side I see the place where I am now. The trip for me becomes a transition through time and space.

The dominant feature of this landscape is the flat horizon. People often describe this environment as boring, but for or me it is the opposite. As I watch the passing landscape closely, the subtle changes in elevation form multiple horizons that move together, passing at various speeds. The far horizon is a stationary background that moves slowly along with me. The middle ground, receding, mirrors my own speed of motion, and the foreground is a blur. This effect is easiest for me to perceive when I concentrate on the landscape directly parallel to my direction of travel and pretend as if it does not extend beyond my narrow field of view.

There are layers of rhythms. Passing corn rows flicker by. Power lines rise-fall-rise next to the road as if they are drawn directly on the sky. Birds travel in cloud-like flocks and orderly lines, or sit evenly spaced on wires. High-tension wires slowly dip and almost touch the tops of agricultural irrigators. Utility poles and mile markers punctuate the blurred words of passing signs. Vehicles speed past in the opposite direction, car windows and tanker trucks reflecting the road, the sky, and fields. Trees close to the road form patterns of flashing light, moving past so quickly that they become transparent and net-like. On the far horizon, soft clusters of trees in the prairie groves drift along slowly like ocean ships. Cliché but true, all of this together has a musical quality.

When I travel someplace new, I have daydreams of anticipation. But my daydreams between Springfield and Chicago are daydreams of memory. I’ve grown up here and my memory is mixed with memories I see in the landscape.

The route itself is a history of things known but absent. An entire race is present only in placenames and the knowledge that present roads are based on their footpaths. The prairie groves have traditional names, often forgotten now, of settlers from the 1830s who displaced aboriginal inhabitants, having themselves displaced other aboriginal inhabitants. The tallgrass prairies have disappeared as well, present now as agricultural fields with vibrant black soil, eternally black, an accumulation of thousands of seasons. Strip mines tell of the coal below, accumulated over millions of years. Everywhere things are decaying and transitioning: cornstalk residue in the fields, old buildings and farms, a rural landscape becoming urban. I know these things unconsciously in my daydreams as I watch the landscape while traveling through it.

When I remember the trip I begin to daydream again and my memories become a single image. My mind wants to recall every detail at once. I review, sort and edit all of my photographs from the trip, superimpose them on each other. The fragments of movement build into some sort of logical sequence that represents my memory of traveling on I-55.

Photography: Reading, Talking and Writing

The last is what I never have time to do. I've been shooting a lot. Reading some great things, too. Talking has been productive for me recently as well, although I always worry about what starts coming out of my mouth. When I begin to talk about the what I'm seeing, thinking and reading, I feel like I'm verbally untying a knot in real time. One of those nasty knots that requires the use of teeth. Not always a pretty sight when done in front of others.

But writing is the most difficult of all. I love to do it but it's challenging and time consuming. Challenging (in a good way) because it forces me to fully digest the things I'm seeing, reading, thinking and trying to discuss intelligently. I'm resolving to do more of it.

There's an odd lack of books about critical photographic theory that actually consider the act of seeing/watching. Most photo books investigate mediums and origins or explore the academic politics of imagemaking.

"The Photography Reader" by Liz Wells is an example of the latter. I'm sure a Marxist reconsideration of Edward Weston's motives is interesting and perhaps necessary for some, but for me it does not explain much about his seeing process. I can't relate to it because that's simply not what's going through my head while I'm making images.

The books I've found most rewarding are those which include the actual words of photographers or directly consider the physiological and psychological experience of seeing. These are a rare breed. Susan Sontag's "On Photography" is the best model I can think of.

I've found a few others recently that approach photography in a similar way. "Poetics of Space: A Critical Photography Anthology," edited by Steve Yates, is a book I've had for a long time. It went completely over my head when I read it years ago but re-reading it this year was a revelation. "Sculpting in Time" by Andrey Tarkovsky had the same effect. It was simply too much for me to absorb when I first read it about 15 years ago. It is the best explanation I've ever read about the humanism inherent in making images.

"Conversations With Contemporary Photographers" is wonderful because it is actual interviews with incredibly gifted and articulate photographers. Reading about the personal approach other photographers bring to their craft teaches me far more that actually looking at images in most cases. I relate more to their seeing process than the results.

"The Education of a Photographer" is also good, except, ironically, for the interviews at the end of the book with photographers who are teaching or have studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York. These 'interviews' are actually essays -- it appears the interviewees were given a list of questions and provided expository answers. They almost uniformly drift away from the wonderful investigations of seeing in the first three quarters of the book. However, they are interesting in that they constitute the current academic gospel on why and how photographers should be making images and how they should be taught to do so.

I'm reading the The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard right now. Just amazing. A portion of it was included in "Poetics of Space: A Critical Photography Anthology" and I've wanted to read this book ever since.

All of these writings about photography concern the process of representing space and time with lens-based tools. They look not so much at the image but the making of the image. I believe great images represent a feeling or emotion isolated within a particular place in time and space. Great images question without trying to provide answers and don't take reality for granted.